


Taangit

by The_Readers_Muse



Category: The Hobbit (Jackson Movies), The Hobbit - All Media Types, The Hobbit - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Movies), The Lord of the Rings - All Media Types, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: Angst, M/M, Mini Fic, Post "Hobbit" - pre: "The Lord of the Rings era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-31
Updated: 2016-01-31
Packaged: 2018-05-17 11:50:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5868232
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Readers_Muse/pseuds/The_Readers_Muse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Don't go."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Taangit

**Author's Note:**

> Disclaimer: I don't own The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. Everything belongs to whoever owns them, my wishful thinking aside.
> 
> Authors Note #1: Anon wanted Dwori: - Write a mini fic for: "things you said after you kissed me."

The arrow in his breast had long stopped hurting. It’s dark tip leeching a fell chill through his bones he no longer had the strength to fight as he leaned up against Balin’s tomb. Seeking the comfort of his dear friend as his breathing grew thin and labored. Watching as the last of the candles flickered from the walls in their scone hollows, waiting to plunge the room into darkness.

He didn’t mourn the pain’s end, but he did regret the obstruction. Unwilling to remove it lest he lose red too quickly and perish before his task was done. The legacy of this final adventure had been entrusted to him and he would not fail. There would be no victory here. No glorious ending that the survivors could tell their dwarflings during the cold winter months. 

Moria had fallen once more.

They had failed.

The Book of Mazarbul was heavy in his lap and he finished the final pages. Scolding himself as the lines began to dip and smear. Thick fingers going numb as he tried to force the letters he knew so well onto the seeding parchment as the sound of distant drums echoed from the deep. 

_Drums._

_Drums in the deep._

His hand shook. The enemy was moving again. Pushing forward like the foul host they were. Seeking to undo all the good they had brought back to these ancient halls in the past five years. But it wasn’t just orcs. There was something else. Something older that dwelled here. Something that frightened him far more than any dragon. Something that made his ink smear across the page when the sound of distant footfalls rose up from the mountain’s molten depths.

The line of his mouth twisted and narrowed as he blinked his vision clear.

_Master Balin would have had his braids for such shoddy workmanship._

He was losing light. The forge-lit spark in his heart was dimming. A hard truth hallmarked by a sudden splatter of red that dripped across the dirty page when he leaned over to see. Quill going lax in his fingers as the final letter whisked across the parchment with an awkward, overlong stroke.

His death was near. As were his regrets. Looming and cold as the bodies of his fallen brothers remained littered around him, bleeding into the dusty flagstones. He regretted not being there when Oin had fallen at the Western Gates. He regretted not being able to take the arrow that had felled Balin in the Great Pillared hall when the orcs had spilled out of the cracks in the rock like a thousand ghostly spiders. He regretted not seeing Dori and Nori once last time - not sending them that letter that was still sitting unfinished on his desk in his rooms.

But most of all, he regretted the look on his lover’s face when they’d parted. He remembered how the shy kiss he’d offered before they’d set out had been turned near vicious by the warrior’s lips. Eyes dark with indecision as his duty to Dain, King under the Mountain, kept his boots firmly on Erebor’s rocky peaks, but the desires of his heart beckoned him elsewhere.

“Don’t go,” Dwalin had said roughly as the haze of dawn chased it’s own shadow down the lightening peaks. Turning his lover’s craggy features into a pantomime of unuttered emotion. A gauntlet of words the warrior meant - felt - but would never say as Balin swung himself up onto his Mountain Goat, calling for the company to start moving down the narrow mountain path. “Don’t go.”

He smiled sadly as his lashes fluttered. Shuddering across blood-smeared cheeks as he closed the book for the last time. Red beard still woven thick with his lover’s braid, capped with a Mithril bead and that single emerald gem etched deep with the runes of a promise long made. 

The one whose twin he’d braided into the coarse of Dwalin’s beard before his lover had pulled him down into the sheets of their bed and consummated their love in the only true way they knew how. Holding each other long into that last night as the uncertainty of the coming years gradually turned the sound of the distant celebration sober.

“Gajut men, athune lananubukhs,” he whispered into the growing dark. “Gajut men.”

**Author's Note:**

> Reference: (Dwarfish translations)
> 
> * "Taangit" = "arrow."  
> * "Gajut men, athune. Gajut me." = Forgive me, my love. Forgive me."


End file.
